Last week, Facebook did a post on their media site about Facebook author tags. Many blogs, including sites we love like SearchEngineJournal, picked it up as though it was the best new thing since sliced bread. It’s not, obviously, mostly because it’s not actually new. You see, Facebook did release their author tags in June, but not this year, not last year, but two whole years ago. We included it in WordPress SEO 2 days later. Two years ago.

The confusion about how new the Facebook author tags feature was caused us to be slightly surprised when we suddenly got questions from our WordPress SEO Premium customers as to whether we’d include it. We did however write a piece on our knowledge base (which we restyled last week too) about how to implement Facebook author tags with our SEO plugin.

Facebook OpenGraph support in WP SEO by Yoast

Facebook meta data is put on the page in so-called OpenGraph tags. WordPress SEO has some of the most extensive Facebook OpenGraph support you’ll find in plugins out there. If you enable OpenGraph on the Social settings page, it’ll all happen automatically:

Enable Facebook Author tags

For the Facebook author tags feature to work though, you actually have to go into the user profile page of your WordPress install and enter your own Facebook profile URL. That’s it. The plugin will then automatically add more things, like the publisher tags, image tags, a description tag, article type etc. etc. Lots of things you don’t need to think about, we’ll optimize it for you.

If you want to further optimize your OpenGraph output, you can change some of the things the plugin will output on the Social tab of the WordPress SEO metabox:

We recently added the recommended image size in the descriptions of those upload fields, mostly as we kept forgetting them ourselves.

Just one more reason to use WordPress SEO by Yoast!

This post first appeared as Facebook author tags & Yoast SEO on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!